Chatterton

by Peter Ackroyd

In this remarkable detective novel Peter Ackroyd investigates the death of Thomas Chatterton, the eighteenth-century poet-forger and genius, whose life ended under mysterious circumstances. Fusing themes of illusion and imagination, delusion and dreams, he weaves back and forth between three centuries, introducing a blazing cast of Dickensian eccentrics and rogues, from the outrageous, gin-sipping Harriet Scrope, an elderly female novelist, to the tragic young poet, Charles Wychwood, seeker of Chatterton's secret... They find more riddles than answers from their search.

This entertaining comedy is at once hilarious, and a thoughtful exploration of the deepest issues of both life and art.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Mystery, Historical, Novels, British Literature, Literature

234 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Peter Ackroyd CBE is an English novelist and biographer with a particular interest in the history and culture of London.

Peter Ackroyd's mother worked in the personnel department of an engineering firm, his father having left the family home when Ackroyd was a baby. He was reading newspapers by the age of 5 and, at 9, wrote a play about Guy Fawkes. Reputedly, he first realized he was gay at the age of 7.

Ackroyd was educated at St. Benedict's, Ealing and at Clare College, Cambridge, from which he graduated with a double first in English. In 1972, he was a Mellon Fellow at Yale University in the United States. The result of this fellowship was Ackroyd's Notes for a New Culture, written when he was only 22 and eventually published in 1976. The title, a playful echo of T. S. Eliot's Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), was an early indication of Ackroyd's penchant for creatively exploring and reexamining the works of other London-based writers.

Ackroyd's literary career began with poetry, including such works as London Lickpenny (1973) and The Diversions of Purley (1987). He later moved into fiction and has become an acclaimed author, winning the 1998 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for the biography Thomas More and being shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1987.

Ackroyd worked at The Spectator magazine between 1973 and 1977 and became joint managing editor in 1978. In 1982 he published The Great Fire of London, his first novel. This novel deals with one of Ackroyd's great heroes, Charles Dickens, and is a reworking of Little Dorrit. The novel set the stage for the long sequence of novels Ackroyd has produced since, all of which deal in some way with the complex interaction of time and space, and what Ackroyd calls "the spirit of place". It is also the first in a sequence of novels of London, through which he traces the changing, but curiously consistent nature of the city. Often this theme is explored through the city's artists, and especially its writers.

Ackroyd has always shown a great interest in the city of London, and one of his best known works, London: The Biography, is an extensive and thorough discussion of London through the ages.

His fascination with London literary and artistic figures is also displayed in the sequence of biographies he has produced of Ezra Pound (1980), T. S. Eliot (1984), Charles Dickens (1990), William Blake (1995), Thomas More (1998), Chaucer (2004), William Shakespeare (2005), and J. M. W. Turner. The city itself stands astride all these works, as it does in the fiction.

From 2003 to 2005, Ackroyd wrote a six-book non-fiction series (Voyages Through Time), intended for readers as young as eight. This was his first work for children. The critically acclaimed series is an extensive narrative of key periods in world history.

Early in his career, Ackroyd was nominated a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1984 and, as well as producing fiction, biography and other literary works, is also a regular radio and television broadcaster and book critic.

In the New Year's honours list of 2003, Ackroyd was awarded the CBE.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

“A dreary stillness broods o’er all the vale,
The clouded moon emits a feeble glare;
Joyless I seek the darkling hill and dale,
Where’er I wander, sorrow still is there.”
Thomas Chatterton – Elegy: Joyless I Seek the Solitary Shade
The novel is packed with all kinds of weirdoes and crazies… The story begins with an accidental discovery of the strange portrait in the odd curiosity shop…

It was a portrait of a seated figure: there was a certain negligent ease in the man’s posture, but then Charles noticed how lightly his left hand gripped some pages of manuscript placed upon his lap, and how indecisively his right hand seemed to hover above a small table where four quarto volumes were piled on top of each other.

Chatterton is a grim satire on the theme of mystifications, imitations, plagiarism and forgery…
George Meredith faking Thomas Chatterton’s death… Thomas Chatterton faking the medieval monk’s life…

Then I introduc’d my own speculations in physic, drama, and philosophy, all of them cunningly changed by the ancient Hand and Spelling I had learn’d; but conceeved by me with such Intensity that they became more real than the Age in which I walked. I reproduc’d the Past and filled it with such Details that it was as if I were observing it in front of me: so the Language of ancient Dayes awoke the Reality itself for, tho’ I knew that it was I who composed these Histories, I knew also that they were true ones.

When oddballs write eccentric books, they always push literature forward.

[Shovelmonkey1 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Every so often I like to have a little Peter Ackroyd love-in. I'll get my Peter Ackroyd mug out, stare wistfully at my Peter Ackroyd wall paper and sit around in my Peter Ackroyd T-shirt. Ok, maybe there is no such thing - I have no idea if such merchandise actually exists but if not, well then Peter, you are missing a trick.

I'm a fan of his work, both fiction and non fiction and the man knows his stuff. His knowledge of very specific periods and areas of 18th and 19th Century British History is exceptional and his ability to resurrect, in an almost Lazarus-like way forgotten historical figures is, frankly, amazing.

I've read The Lambs of London, Hawksmoor, The House of Doctor Dee and The Trial of Elizabeth Cree aka Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem and while my love for them all was not equal there has been something to like in all of them at least. Chatterton sits somewhere between The Lambs of London and Dan Leno, with Hawksmoor getting the biggest thumbs up. (The House of Doctor Dee is at the bottom of the rankings for being just a bit too weird).

Chatterton tells the story of Thomas Chatterton 18th century Bristolian boy-poet who liked to flaunt his poetic prowess by forging earlier works, specifically those he attributed to made-up monk Thomas Rowley. Rather brilliantly Chatterton is less famous as a fraudulent poet and more famous for his accidental suicide while trying to self medicate with an arsenical/opiate kill or cure mix used to counteract against a virulent dose of the Clap.

This book is the Back to the Future Trilogy gone all 18th century on your asses. Ackroyd invites us inside his papery Delorian and takes us on a journey through time to visit four different aspects of Chatterton's history as perceived by various groups who are interested in him (patron and publisher, artist, poet and historian). The stories are cleverly woven and lines of Chatterton's poems run across the pages of each chapter like a shiny historic thread pulling the whole thing together.

Engaging and off-beat with a host of mad and maddening characters who gamble across the pages like medieval fools. Here Ackroyd demonstrates his ability to include the camp and the absurd, perhaps highlighting how absurb how much of British History really is when you take a good hard look at it. For further absurdist looks at British history then I would recommend you also take a look at the Discworld Series by Sir Terry Pratchett. I'm not sure how these two authors would feel about being mentioned in the same review but I bet they'd have a lot to talk about.

[nettebuecherkiste]

Nachtrag von vor drölfzig Jahren

[Thom Dunn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe you have to be British. This here book----didn't like it. Felt throughout a quirky fustiness about the whole enterprise. Dickensian characters--yes, but no one I could take to my heart. Great evocations of color, of liebestod, of this and that. Me ? I couldn't care less. My bad.

[Cassidy Brinn · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book would have been better if it had been a little more interested in its characters and less obsessed with its Theme: what is the difference between ‘authentic’ and ‘fake’, particularly in the arts? The answer which Ackroyd pounded over my head is - trick question! No difference at all. We cannot escape the influences of the past on everything we create, so no need to try to avoid plagiarism or condemn ghost writing. Likewise, no need to worry about whether a work of art is authentically old or done by some famous artist, your experience creates its truth. In the symbolism of the book: Chatterton lives! He is right there behind you, telling you what to do! You may even be Chatterton yourself! Who the hell knows? You sure don't, so why don't you just go ahead and enjoy that painting or poem without breaking your head over whether or not it’s authentic.

That’s the Message I felt like I kept hearing, anyway. Not that Ackroyd was content to stop there. He stretches the theme every way it’ll go, letting his characters yammer on about the nature of truth and reality and representation and identity and life and death and god knows what else. Opening the book at random, I see the line “If there were no truths, everything was true.” Yawn. I doubt I caught all the nuances, or even correctly interpreted what I did catch (oh but what would that mean? wheee!), because I simply did not find the musings convincing or interesting enough to think about them for long. Now, I do like me some musing, but here, they felt forced and old-fashioned - can 1987 be so long ago? Alas, it can. But wait, Acky, I thought the past was present all the time? NO! Actually, there is such a thing as progress and that’s why this book can sit with a bunch of other post-modern romps and decay there because we have gotten past that shit!

Okay that’s what I did not like about the book. It pales though next to what I loved. Like the characters! Odd that most of the other reviewers here hated them. Yes they were ‘eccentric’ but is that not another way to say ‘not boring’? I found them entirely believable and witty and fun to observe. I was above all taken by Harriet Scrope, the manipulative morbid old novelist. Opening the book at random again, I find her random lie to another person in the hospital waiting room, spoken while one of the protagonists is dying offstage: “Actually, I’m here for a sex change.” Classic Harriet! And while most all the characters speak and move in an outlandish fashion, shouting out nonsense and often flailing about, the insight into their thoughts and motivations is cuttingly realistic and well-integrated into the dialogue. The irreverent playfulness does not lessen the satire of our social behavior, and that’s what kept the book fun to read, despite its inflated pretensions.

[Elizabeth (Alaska) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Before beginning his novel, Ackroyd gives us a one page biography of Thomas Chatterton, 1752-1770. Chatterton was a poet who recognized early that his strength was in copying the styles of others. His best work was when his poems were purported to be by the medieval monk, Rowley. Forgeries, in fact, is where his strength lay. But please note that his life was brief. He died of suicide at the age of 18, having taken an overdose of arsenic.

The novel is set mostly in the present when Charles, a poet, finds himself the possesor of an old painting that he acquired in a pawn shop when he went in to sell some books. He was not offered enough for the books and brought home the painting in trade. Soon, Charles decides this is an 1802 painting of Thomas Chatterton. Did Chatterton fake his death? Has he uncovered an important piece of history?

Another time period is that of 1856. The cover of this edition is of a painting by Henry Wallis of Chatterton on his death bed. The poet George Meredith was the model for this. Finally, there are a few pages of Chatterton himself. These latter two time periods are interspersed with those set in the present.

I liked the structure of this. Ackroyd gives us history but then sort of makes a right turn and has us asking "What if?" It's easy to go along with that, though I was always completely aware this is a novel. Ackroyd did something similar in his The Lambs of London. I know next to nothing of this sort of British history and Ackroyd has me learning, even while writing things that are definitely not history.

This got better as I read. Perhaps I needed the foundation of the earlier parts of the novel to be fully involved with the later pages. Still, I'm coloring in only 3 stars, with an added note that I might be short-changing it.

[Philip · Rating 4 out of 5]

Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton presents an enigma seen from several contrasting, some related standpoints. It seems to deal with the concept of authenticity and its consequences. In general we like things to be authentic. We like the people we meet and the possessions we own to be genuine. But what if they are not? Does it matter?

The historical basis upon which Peter Ackroyd hangs the plot of his novel is the life of Thomas Chatterton, the poet who committed suicide at the slight age of eighteen. Wallis’s iconic painting of the death adorns the book’s cover and its creation in the mid-nineteenth century forms a major element of the book’s plot. There’s also an eccentric English lady who has made money from writing and drinks gin incessantly from a teaspoon. There’s an art gallery offering some works by a famous painter. They are declared fakes.

Charles Wychwood is an ailing, none too successful poet. He has a wonderful relationship with his young son, and a cooler one with his wife who has grown used to supporting her husband’s apparent lack of achievement. One day Charles decides to raise a little capital in a sale-room, but then ends up blowing his money on a painting. It’s a portrait, professedly of a middle-aged Chatterton. So perhaps he faked his own death so he could continue his trade anonymously. The idea captivates Charles because he knows a little of the poet’s background.

Chatterton was born in the later part of the eighteenth century. He became obsessed with a series of medieval texts and started to copy their style. Thus he became the author of bogus medieval poetry, some of which he managed to publish. Unfortunately, he chose to publish not in his own name but in the name of a lost and forgotten medieval writer, thus passing off his own modern work as “genuine”. Writers, like academics, tend to regard plagiarism as a capital offence. But in Chatterton’s case, it wasn’t plagiarism, was it? He wasn’t trying to pass off another’s work as his own. He was merely adopting a pen name which implied that the material came from a different era. One brings to mind the myriad of pop singers, pianists, opera stars, actors or even television personalities who have adapted new names and apparently different personas in their attempts to open doors. What price a genuine article? I recall hawkers parading through Kuta in Bali with their open wooden boxes of watches shouting, “Rolex, Cartier, genuine imitation.”

But Chatterton’s mimic status was uncovered. Scandal ensued and he earned no more. Penniless in a London garret he poisoned himself. Wallis painted the scene, albeit more than a generation later, it’s apparent verisimilitude pure fake. We know the picture. The poet’s red hair contrasts with his death pallor. An arm trails on the floor, the open window above suggesting a world beyond. But, of course, the man in the picture is a model, none other than the novelist, George Meredith. He made it into this picture of faked death only because the painter fancied his wife.

So if the painterly aspects of the canvas might be genuine, its context is mere reconstruction, perhaps invention. Does this devalue it? But what if Chatterton did not die at that young age? What if Charles Wychwood’s painting of Chatterton in middle age is genuine? Did Chatterton fake more than poems? (Even if he did actually write them!)

Charles buys the painting and then visits Bristol to uncover some roots. He meets Joynson, an elderly man who speaks only in riddles. A box of the poet’s memorabilia is secured. Is any of it real? Is any of it genuine?

And so the novel unfolds. What is authentic is often fake and what is genuine is often impersonated. But if a painting is worth looking at, does it matter too much if it is merely the content of a painter’s imagination? Does it have to possess authenticity, even a pedigree to be an artwork? And so what if Chatterton did, or did not die? If he did, he died accused of being a fake, which he wasn’t, because he did write his poetry. If he did not die, then perhaps he was a fake, because in that case we have no idea what else he did not write!

Like all Peter Ackroyd’s writing, Chatterton makes the reader think. And by the way, Chatterton’s characters are themselves creations of the author. They aren’t genuine, are they?

[Jon · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not as good as Lambs of London. The story of Thomas Chatterton, the gifted poet who died (suicide?) at 18--the conceit is that he might actually have faked his own death, lived on, and "ghosted" some of the most famous poetry allegedly written by other famous poets. And the effect of this possibility on some modern London writers. Some thoroughly disagreeable characters and Dickensian eccentrics introduced for no point that I could discern. A nice evocation of early 19th C England; but the attempts at deep significance and mysterious ghostly/spiritual influence between writers somehow seemed both too opaque and too simple to be very convincing.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

I finished my winter Peter Ackroyd binge with "Chatterton" based on the brief life of the 18th century poet, Thomas Chatterton, a suicide at 17. Ackroyd's retelling, as his work often does, includes a parallel story about late 20th century London literary people.

With relatively little actual biographical material to draw on, Ackroyd concocts an amusing fantasy of literary forgery, the sort of story that always makes me think of William Gaddis' "The Recognitions".

[Özgür Balmumcu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Okura sanatın derinliğini hissettiren bir roman. Resim, şiir ve roman üç koldan ilerleyen hikâyede buluşmuş sanki. Her bir karakter bir şekilde okura geçmeyi başarıyor. Aslında bu yapıdaki bir romanda ağırbaşlı, dingin bir anlatı çok daha iyi sonuçlar verebilirdi. Yazar oldukça dinamik bir anlatıyı tercih etmiş. Çoğu zaman kelimeleri adeta koşturmuş. Bu da bana bir miktar keşke dedirtti. Romanın merkezinde kopyalamak meselesi var. Sanat kopyalanabilir mi sorusundan yola çıkıp kopyacı hayatlara yelken açan, düşündüren, yoran, güldüren, iz bırakan bir roman.

[Beril · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5

[Maia Roberts · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rather weird but quite good.

[Tim · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had been looking forward to reading something by this author for some time. Maybe I would have been better off with another one of his books, or actually reading rather than listening. (This was a BBC audiobook, read by James Wilby). To begin with, I thought I had purchased a biography of Thomas Chatterton. I hadn't. This is a novel. A crew of annoying characters populates this speculative tale concerning poet Thomas Chatterton, who was of course the classic romantic what-if tale of English literature - a gifted young poet whose work went unrecognized in his time, a fact that helped push him to commit suicide at age 19 or so.

In this book, an unsuccessful English writer discovers an old painting, which appears to be of Chatterton, but as a grown man. The story develops that perhaps Chatterton faked his own death, and from that point used a variety of noms de plume. The themes of doubling, faking, and questionable authorship persist throughout the story, and to be honest, I had trouble keeping up with all of it. An old female writer, the young writer's boss, also gets involved. There are attempts at adding levity by the portrayal of this loony crone (and other eccentrics) but these mostly fall flat. What I found most enjoyable was the historical fiction parts of it, the scenes of young Chatterton and his mates having discussions and plotting his phony demise - but the majority of the book takes place in the modern world, and the numerous inconsequential discussions and the like made me yearn for a blue pencil. Ackroyd is known mostly as a biographer (of Dickens and others). I still would like to give one of those a try.

[Mac · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book has the ingredients for a great story--suicide, plagiarism, mysterious paintings, discovered documents, and a narrative intercut across different centuries. There are strange characters, confusion, misunderstandings, and deceptions aplenty. Take Chatterton's suicide as just one example. Was it real, faked, or misunderstood?

So why the one-star rating? The dialogue is initially interesting, then bizarre, and ultimately irritating. The characters rarely have realistic conversations; instead, they continually engage in banter, the ping pong of endless repartee. At times, the conversations sound like playing the dozens, a drawn out game of snaps at a junior high school. I'm guessing the conversations are supposed to be witty and humorous. Perhaps I missed the point, but I didn't care for the dialogue, and I didn't like the novel.

[Leslie · Rating 2 out of 5]

really postmodern and kind of crap. what i really wanted was a historical fiction novel about Thomas Chatterton, a 18th century plagiarist of medieval poetry who committed suicide with arsenic at age 17. this novel posits that he didn't actually die, but lived to write stuff that people then attributed to William Blake and stuff. which is an interesting premise, but it jumps back and forth between the present and the past with minimal connection, and i had absolutely no emotional investment in any of the characters. in fact, i actively hated about 2/3 of them.

the most interesting parts are about the poet George Meredith posing for the famous painting of Chatterton's death, which i saw in the Tate Britain, and which started this whole mess.

[Alun · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was my first sortie into Peter Ackroyd's novels and I was disappointed, hence the low rating. I had heard much about his style and how clever the novel was. As a historian, I was interested in the idea of blending fiction with history, too.

I found Chatterton rather trivial. I found the characters trivial and forgettable. I didn't care for any of them and in the end, I was pleased to finish the book and put it back in our small library.

At some future point, I will re-read it. I have read most of the books there more than once. I won't, sadly, be rushing nor will it be on the list that I have to re-visit every few years.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had a difficult time getting into this one on the first try; it was as though Ackroyd was making every character obnoxiously weird and grating, to excess. Luckily, it only took a little reader's push to get to the captivating stuff. I half-expected Chatterton to actually be alive, hundreds of years later, and was disappointed to find that he wasn't. Still, I enjoyed the book. Ackroyd has some interesting things to say about the nature of truth and art.

[George · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. An engaging, entertaining, original, partly historical fiction novel about plagiarism and death, involving Charles Wychwood, a modern poet, and 18th century Thomas Chatterton, a forger of medieval poems, who died at the age of 18, in 1770. His death is thought to be suicide. Charles Wychwood comes across a portrait that he believes is Thomas Chatterton. The portrait shows a Thomas Chatterton who looks around the age of fifty! Charles believes this shows that Thomas Chatterton staged his death and actually lived to write poems that are attributed to others. As an 18 year old, is was viewed that Thomas Chatterton had a prodigious talent as a poet! Charles also finds some papers he believes are the writings of Chatterton.

A sometimes witty novel exploring the issues of authenticity in life and art.

This book was shortlisted for the 1987 Booker Prize.

[Ekin · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of the most difficult reads of my life

[Ina · Rating 2 out of 5]

Had potential.

[Tamsin Hartnell · Rating 1 out of 5]

I am a fan of Peter Ackroyd, but I couldn't finish this.

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the issues I have with modern literature, and modern entertainment in general, is that it perverts reality by describing it at the margines. Gone are the days of the Victorian novels of Austen and the Bronte’s, who richly described provincial British life as lived by the average British provincial. As if the ghost of Freud descended upon fiction to impose his theories of psychoanalysis on that of the auther, modern writers and artists at the turn of the twentieth century began experimenting with more surreal forms as well as characters and plots. The result as been, to use the term from Harold Bloom, the Chaotic Age of literature.

This brings me to Peter Ackroyd, whose novel Chatterton I picked up because I saw that it had been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 1987. Ackroyd here composes a highly original, funny, and meaningful work such as Chatterton, despite its unorthodoxies.

The novel itself is really many novels in one. The outside story is that of Charles Wychwood, a modern poet and failure. His young son is intelligent, and his friends are caring and reasonable people, if not odd. His wife, who works in an art galary, is a loving and thoughtful wife. Charles has bouts of sickness and delirium, and has odd habits such as the eating of paper torn out of novels. Harret Scrope, a successful modern novelist and, it is revealed in the end, plagiarist, hires Charles on to help her compose her autobiography. When she discovers, that Charles has stumbled upon a picture, signed by a George Stead in the early 1800’s of Thomas Chatterton, along with some manuscripts, she begins to stalk Charles’ discovery as the truly villainous creature of the novel.

The question to be answered is not only what will happen to Charles, his family, and Harriet, but what happened to Chatterton? Was he a plagiarist or an authentic poet? Did he actually commit suicide, or was it a ruse set up by Chatterton and his publisher? Was Chatterton really responsible for the lines we have inherited by the great poets in English history, as Charles begins to believe? The story slowly takes hold, and is dotted by vignettes of other historical events, such as the posing of George Meredith as Thomas Chatterton and his wife’s betrayal of him to Henry Wallis, an event that is historically accurate. The demented margins of society are wrought out in troubling scenes as Charles and his friend try to uncover the story behind the picture, and the people that seem to have been driven mad by the power of the picture itself.

In the end, each story line connects to the other despite the differences in sequence and time. The novel, while strange, presents interpretations of what Chatterton’s life meant, what his death meant, and what truth and art mean. While the claims sound fantastic, they are plausible enough to make one wonder, and Ackroyd knocks them to the ground in the end so as not to push reality too far, but he does it while the reader is emotionally engaged with Charles Wychwood’s family after his death so as not to introduce the melodrama and disappointment of the mystery vaporizing before the reader’s eyes.

Personally, I was left pitying Charles’ family, and sad that the historical fancy turned out to be just that. I was also very impressed. Ackroyd’s knowledge of poetry and art shine through, along with the various time periods presented in Chatterton. For the originalities in style, and the sheer intelligence of the work, I strongly recommend this to any lover of literature, poetry, art, or history. It is at once a meloncholy, exhilirating and intellectually enriching work.

[Monica · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thanks, Ruth. I've been mesmerized by this image since the late 60s/early 70s. It was a hippie thing. But like hippie things, I don't remember where or when I was introduced to it!!

Sept 9 '10

Fiction and I are often at odds. I really want a biography about Chatterton, not more myths, and, even though this book was nominated for a Booker Prize, it would take another reading for me to make sense of it, and that's not something I'm willing to do. If this were more than 250 pages I would have been out of here. At one point toward the beginning, descriptions interchanged between a cat and a lady and I couldn't understand why. Was Ackroyd insulting the person by using cat descriptions?

My feelings are conflicted because there are sensitive, insightful passages about human experience, but the plot was never cohesive and I sensed anti-Irish (Chatterton’s lover?) and anti-female (every female character) characterizations.

It took forever for the book to have anything to do with Thomas Chatterton and I never did figure out the cast of characters.

I’ve never read a novel based on a painting. It’s an interesting concept for a book. Chatterton’s red hair, clothing, and inner thoughts are vivid, but there are only a few places where that's true, and they're right at the end.

There are passages about painting, shadow, light, pigment, copies, fakes, frauds and all sorts of fantasy and speculation, but I’m not fully satisfied. I’ll be hard pressed to read Chatterton’s poems, except aloud to my self, and I doubt I’ll spend time attempting that. I want to know his work better but I’d probably have to take a course to be as satisfied as I’d like.

Hippies were drawn to Chatterton’s image and to the romantic tone of his poems but if you want to know about Chatterton you have to do your own study.

One thing I can say, I'll never see the the painting in the same light.

[Realini Ionescu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chatterton by Peter Ackroyd has been shortlisted for The Booker Prize in 1987 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...

10 out of 10





Unfortunately, the pleasure, delight even of reading, savoring this amusing, exquisite, wonderful book is more than shadowed – if this note writing takes long enough, it may be annihilated, together with the scrivener…to anticipate a possible Russian missile sent to defend poor Putin from the ‘aggression of the West’ (and to give him credit, the fool scribbling here had been ‘attacking’ the great tyrant [let us change tack and start mixing praise with some distance, just in case the FSB will come to rule the roost in these parts also] to the point where one of the very few comments our lamentable material has attracted has been along the lines of ‘you hate Russia’, which I do not, only there is a huge difference between admiring, worshipping Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Bulgakov, Goncearov - what a stupendous Opus Magnum Oblomov is http://realini.blogspot.com/2018/12/o... - Chekhov and loathing their mass killers…



There is a connection of some kind between one of the main themes of Chatterton and what is happening now in and around Ukraine – to try and jest over something that looks pretty calamitous, it could soon be at the gates, literally, so if this feels somewhat disjointed, distracted and lacking sense, hey, mistakes were made, but not by me – there is a book with that exact tittle http://realini.blogspot.com/2016/01/m... - it is not the Perfect comment because I have to look at the window often and see if there are any ‘little green men’, Soviet comrades and then I keep thinking of my twenty words of Russian, in case we need to keep them on an amiable footing, if they do show up…’Ia liubliu tebe kak sabaka palku’, which a Russian teacher told me it means ‘I love you like the dog loves the stick, albeit in the few decades since I was told that joke, I must have changed it in my mind and what I placed there may be just nonsense…

Chatterton invites us to think about forgeries and authentic art – incidentally, it is difficult to establish that with certainty and the recent proof of Salvador Mundi, allegedly by Leonardo da Vinci, bought initially in the USA for some thousand dollars and then finally reaching Mohamed Ben Salman of Saudi Arabia, where he is the de facto ruler, for the astonishing sum of a quarter of a billion dollars, fake as it may well be is just a further proof of that http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/o... - and it is ever more complicated to separate truth from ‘Fake’, the latter word is of massive significance in this age, when we are invaded, flooded by ‘Fake information’, such as what is coming from the Kremlin, and if we listen to their dirty, disgusting (oops, here I go again, I let my mouth and pen unrestricted and I will end up in a KGB aka FSB jail, the way things are looking, for the ex-secretary of NATO, Rasmussen maybe the name was, and surely many other pundits have voiced the certainty that appeasement will bring exactly the trophies of history [ remember the British Prime minister coming with that infamous piece of paper from Munich and saying ‘we have peace in our time’ and then shortly Hitler moved on into Poland, France, and the list is too long to go on here] and if the Short Despot is allowed to get away with this invasion, he will have other speeches, talking about how great czarist Russia used to control things here and there and then suddenly, Barbarians are again at the gates…episodes from family history come to mind…



Speaking of the Russian language and the necessary words, Davai was the essential one in the World War II invasion, which they called liberation from the Nazis and that would be looking like they have a point there, except once they have eliminated the scourge of one calamity, they replaced it with their own, bringing here communism, which has been for decades (and alas will have consequences for another generation or more, even if the Red comrades keep away from here, this being a NATO ally and all, at least until 2024, when the Ultimate Orange Idiot may occupy the White House again [ the ‘Very Stable Genius’ has talked yesterday about the ‘genius’ Putin, how his move on Ukraine is so savvy and this demonstrates again what a massive problem America and the world have, if Trump is again in the most powerful position in the world, when he will just hand over on a silver plate, my country and so many others] and this could keep us somewhat safe, for the time being, although oil prices have rocketed, markets have tumbled and there is yet more to come) and when they arrived in 1944, everybody knew that they would take everything with ‘Davai’ or the gun, and the women in my family, grandmother and the others, would take to the forests to escape rape and worse at the hands of the Red Army Soldiers…

The question now will be about the way one reflects a work of art or he does not, as is the case now, when Chatterton, for all its merits and Booker Prize shortlisting has been overwhelmed in the mind of this viewer by the specter of Russian missiles pouring in through the gate and windows – after all, the small (mostly metaphorically) tyrant from the Kremlin has rambled on Monday about the Western ‘aggression’ (which is exclusively a phantom in his own mind) and he threaten to annihilate anybody opposing him - in translation, that would be the use of nuclear weapons and the supposedly extra fast missiles they have developed recently…the vicious killer is ready to put the world in danger to see his empire expand



Trying to back to Chatterton, if only for a second, the issue of fake and authentic is that the one that makes the connection with this horrid war that we are witnessing right now – some unfortunate Ukrainians are experiencing it, rather than just seeing it on television as we do and we have to think of the future, once the big bear will have swallowed the whole of the Ukraine (although that is still questionable, for it could go either way, the massive Red Army winning easily, or partisans and resistance fighters creating trouble through a guerilla operation that would deny the invaders at least parts of the vast territory of the second largest country in Europe…there is talk that some military help could get through to these potential partisans through our country and then there is more credibility to the scenario where the Vile dictator would retaliate and continue with his mad wars and attack, using cyber weapons first, my land and then others, possibly looking for a land connection with Kaliningrad and then other treats for his hungry, rotten appetite) they will want much more and try and grab it…

[Colin Davison · Rating 4 out of 5]

As literary a novel as one would expect of a literary editor, biographer and commentator who dreamed of being a poet, a story about originality and forgery, and forgeries of forgeries. So clever, at times it made my head spin.
Ackroyd has a particular sensitivity to the history, the taste and smell of old London and it takes a little persistence to get beyond the cast of eccentrics, dragged as if from a backroom Dickensian gathering of aesthetes.
The sense that they are just this side of reality is reinforced by the book's underlying creative philosophy, summed up in a final judgement on its central, withdrawn, obsessional character: "The important thing is what Charles imagined ... That isn't an illusion. The imagination never dies."
It doesn't help, however, that so many of these semi-grotesques merit little sympathy - Charles especially, a delusional wastrel poet failing to produce poetry, with an all-too-loyal wife.
There were times I wanted to seek a horrible revenge on the affected lot of them - the prissy gallery owner, the novelist friend with latin diarrhoea, and the silly plagiaristic, self-indulgent writer Harriet.
I've come also rather to distrust works of fiction that rely so extensively on visions seen through the three Ds - dreams, drunkenness and delirium. It's rather like science fiction or religious faith that take away objections of rationality to explain the wildest invention.
Still, Ackroyd's facility is something to be wondered at - his skill at changes in tone and perspective. And it's a remarkable achievement to create something both intellectually stimulating and with the tension of a detective story.

[Auli]

Oli suurenmoista lukea Simoneiden jälkeen tällaista kevyttä lukuromaania, joka lisäksi sijoittui kutkuttavasti kirjallisuuden historian maailmaan. Vetävä, jotenkin koristeellinen rakenne siroine, luontevine aikahyppäyksineen ja kolmine aikatasoineen. Erityisen hauskasti gestiikan kautta luonnostellut hahmot joilla mitä omituisimpia eleitä ja tapoja. Teko-elitistis-kulttuuribesserwisseröinti -diskurssia, ironista aforistista sanailua ja surrealistista, pipiä taidepuhetta, siis taattua nokkelaa englantilaista dialogia.

En jaksanut paljon nyrpistellä tematiikan (väärennös, todellisuus, illuusio) jatkuvalle alleviivailulle, mutta se jäi kyllä hämmentämään, että kirjan loppuratkaisu jäi minulle täysin hämäräksi, vaikka pitkin juonta asioita oli selitelty rautalangasta väännellen. Ehkä lopun avoimuus oli tahallista, mutta se tuli yllättäen lukijaa taluttavan kerronnan jälkeen. Joka tapauksessa herkullinen ja viihdyttävä lukukokemus.

[Roswitha · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ackroyd is the brilliant biographer of Blake, Dickens, T.S. Eliot, and the city of London. My guess is he wanted to do a biography of Chatterton, but found that the young poet's story lacked the heft of his usual biographical subjects. One likes to think he also discovered something about Chatterton's purported suicide, something that wouldn't be believed unless presented as fiction.

[SnezhArt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Еще один идеальный роман для искусствоведов и литературоведов.

[Jeneba Charkey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clever and beautiful.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very odd book.